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The high school teacher stabbed to death on the street in a Paris suburb on Friday showed his teenage students a cartoon satirizing the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class on free speech earlier this month, the parents said.
Nordine Chaouadi told Reuters that he was the father of a 13-year-old student attending the civics class taught by the teacher, whom parents meeting outside the university referred to as Mr. Paty. The French media have identified him as Samuel Paty.
The teacher asked the Muslim students to raise their hands and invited them to leave, warning that he would be showing a Mohammad cartoon that could offend, Chaouadi said.
For Muslims, any representation of the Prophet is blasphemous.
Chaouadi said his son, a Muslim, interpreted the teacher’s actions as done out of kindness and respect for his faith.
“He did it to protect children, not to scandalize them,” Chaouadi said.
However, some parents were offended. Two or three days later, they held a meeting at the school with the teacher, the school principal, and an official from the educational authority.
“It went well. There was no yelling or talking between them. My wife participated. She said it was a man who made a mistake, it happens to everyone,” added Chaouadi.
A man who said his daughter was in the class gave a similar account of the lesson in a video recorded around the time of the meeting. However, he called the history teacher a bully and posted the video on social media. The publication was shared by a mosque in Paris, among others.
Reuters could not immediately authenticate the video.
In the video, the man says: “If you want to join forces and say ‘stop, don’t touch our children, then send me a message.’
“This bully must not remain in the national educational system, he must no longer teach our children. He should go get an education ”, he continues in the recording.
The school, the College du Bois d’Aulne in the middle-class suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine, could not immediately be reached for comment.
It was unclear if the attacker, who was shot to death by police and has not been identified, had seen the video.
Legislators and teachers’ unions praised the slain teacher’s courage to confront challenging taboos in French society. Freedom of expression was a fundamental principle of democracy, they said.
Jean-Remi Girard, president of the National Union of School Teachers, told BFM TV that children should understand that profanity can impact, but it is legal.
Blood has been spilled before in France for satire directed at Islam. Islamist militants killed 12 in a shooting at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 after it published a series of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Local center-right lawmaker Antoine Savignat said: “If we can’t talk about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in school, we will end up in denial … In France, the country of free speech, this cannot be allowed to happen.”
